Download FreeCol 0.11.0

Early gamers who spent a lot of time on Colonization, which was released on DOS by Microprose in 1994, should be careful not to get addicted again. In fact, a group of developers is working on an open source version of this turn-based strategy game, called FreeCol. Up through version 1.0, the team will focus on developing an exact copy, but with modern features such as an isometric map and multiplayer support. After that, a development plan is drawn up for version 2.0, to which everyone can contribute ideas. However, it is not that far yet; the developers recently released version 0.11.0 with the following succinct announcement:

FreeCol 0.11.0 released

The FreeCol team are pleased to announce the release of FreeCol 0.11.0. This release is mainly an opportunity for the developers to fix some difficult structural problems that were blocking progress. That said, there are many useful new user visible features, listed in the release notes. And lots of bugs were fixed.

In particular, we had an intractable cluster of bugs that could not be fixed without making an incompatible change to the saved game format and dropping the 0.9.x compatibility code. Therefore, this is 0.11.0, not 0.10.8, and 0.9.x games will no longer load correctly. The hope is that this is the last save-format break before 1.0.

Given the large changes and long gap since the last release, the next release is likely to be a maintenance/bugfix release to tidy up problems that were missed in testing. More people testing the git/trunk would be most welcome.

We hope you enjoy FreeCol 0.11.0. Onward to 1.0.

The FreeCol Team